Here's how we can detect plants on extrasolar planets

The past year has been an exciting time for those engaged in the hunt for extra-solar planets and potentially habitable worlds. In August of 2016, researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the existence ...

Next breakthroughs in exoplanet discovery

It was a good week for astrobiology. Within days of NASA's announcement that the necessary ingredients for life exist in the plumes erupting from the southern pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus, scientists gathered at Stanford ...

Video: Earth as a planet

Earth is the largest rocky planet in our Solar System, and the only body we know of capable of supporting life. With so much news about exoplanets dominating the headlines, in this episode of Space we take a step back to ...

MAVEN reveals Mars has metal in its atmosphere

Mars has electrically charged metal atoms (ions) high in its atmosphere, according to new results from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. The metal ions can reveal previously invisible activity in the mysterious electrically charged ...

When will Mars be close to Earth?

As neighboring planets, Earth and Mars have a few things in common. Both are terrestrial in nature (i.e. rocky), both have tilted axes, and both orbit the sun within its circumstellar habitable zone. And during the course ...

Possible venus twin discovered around dim star

Astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope have found a planet 219 light-years away that seems to be a close relative to Venus. This newly discovered world is only slightly larger than Earth, and orbits a low-temperature ...

page 40 from 40